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Prague 1970: Music in Spring

By Martin Bresnick May 25, 2011 9:10 pmMay 25, 2011 9:10 pm

In The Score, American composers on creating “classical” music in the 21st century.

I.

On March 6, 1970, at the close of the Second International Free Composers Tribune in Prague, the final composer to be represented at the conference, Luigi Nono, spoke for more than 10 minutes before a large audience of mostly Czech musicians, vigorously criticizing my score for the short film “Pour,” which preceded his presentation. Although the protocol of the tribune permitted each composer only 10 minutes to speak about his or her own music, Nono took those 10 minutes to speak about mine, concluding with a scathing condemnation of my use of vernacular music.

Nono then went on for another 10 minutes about the making of his own work, especially pointing out the theoretically correct choice of the pre-recorded sounds he had employed. He then played a tape of his composition “Non Consumiamo Marx.” When the piece was over there were three people left in the hall at the Janacek Composers’ Club at 3 Besedni Street: Luigi Nono, Mr. Okurka (the technician who operated the tape recorder and sound system) and me.

II.

Several months before, in the autumn of 1969, after a politically and musically complicated second year as a graduate student at Stanford University, I left America on a Fulbright Fellowship, with plans to study with Gyorgy Ligeti in Vienna.
As a member of the Students for a Democratic Society at Stanford I had participated in many anti-Vietnam war demonstrations in the Bay Area and — including the 1968 sit-in at the Stanford’s Old Union Building to protest the expulsion of students who had heckled the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, when he visited the campus. In 1969 I helped to occupy (or “liberate” as we said then) the Applied Electronic Laboratory of the Engineering School, where secret war research had been carried out without the knowledge and consent of the university (or anyone else except the Defense Department of Defense, for that matter). The liberators in the basement of the building worked feverishly several nights to publish a daily mimeographed “newspaper” containing the secret contracts and documents they found. It was WikiLeaks avant-la-lettre.

Courtesy of Martin BresnickThe author playing the guitar in his band Salt.

At the time I considered my musical life indirectly related to my politics. I thought the primary connection was the rock band I played in, Salt. Between regular dance gigs, we lugged our equipment to wherever there was a rally or “liberation” to entertain the demonstrators. I sang, played rhythm guitar, and even, on occasion, oboe, my primary “classical” instrument.

Soon after I arrived at Stanford I was taken under the wing of the composer John Chowning, whose efforts to use the power of computers to create music had recently begun. Working with John was a turning point for me. When I was engaged with computer music, my thoughts about the rock band and politics moved to the background of my attention. When a demonstration was called, the politics moved back to the front.

Patte WoodJohn Chowning

I quickly learned that in order to get any results out of the computer I had to work with tedious precision. But John’s understanding of the acoustics of music and his enthusiasm for the potential of computers to create previously unimagined and unimaginable sounds and patterns was infectious. It overcame the exacting, exhausting work that had to be done. Despite the tedium of computer music in 1968-69 I paradoxically felt a new and powerful incentive to think more freely. The densely crowded surface of my musical slate was beginning to be cleared of more conventional thinking. New possibilities appeared in every direction.

There was no book or tradition I knew of to consult about this, no look-up table for aesthetic correctness or judgment. No obvious single way to proceed. I was struggling to create a context and criteria for my music and also, as I later discovered, my politics as well.

During that time, I also put up a number 3-by-5 index cards in the Film and Communications department advertising my services as a film composer (that I had never written any film music before did not deter me). It worked. My first film scores were for a series of 30-second “Fair Housing” spots the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had contracted to stop racial discrimination in housing. This was early proof that the U.S. government’s involvement in student life at Stanford (including my National Defense Education Act Scholarship), was complicated.

In the spring of 1969, Kathy Hansen (now Kathleen Hansen-Butler), a talented young undergraduate film student, asked me to create a score for a short film she had directed and produced with Betsy Blackmer called “Pour.”

The film concerned the inventive casting technique of a local Bay Area sculptor, Merrill Bickford. His method involved pouring molten metals onto organic detritus he found in the woods around the San Francisco Peninsula. Bickford was a photogenic and charismatic bohemian, with a bright smile and wild blond hair that flashed like the fiery silver castings he made in the brilliant California sun.

I created my score from sources that had preoccupied me at the time — swarms of computer pitches whose range of randomness waxed and waned while smoothly slowing down or accelerating, as well as clangorous, frequency-modulated bell tones that John Chowning and I were then exploring. I also made a computer rendition of the old Irish folk song I knew called “The Song of the Silkie.” Late one night Kathy and I went to the old music department building (now the Center for Research in Computer Music and Acoustics) to record more music. In the reverberant hallway of the empty building Kathy and I taped the soprano Kit Haight singing the melody of “The Song of the Silkie” to words I had substituted from W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” Though I had never made a tape-loop before, with Kathy’s help I constructed a series of them that included all the computer music as well as the refrain “because a fire was in my head” from the song. These elements, physically manipulated then mixed together, comprised the score. My aim had been to support the film’s images in an indirect, oblique way — to underline the general character and subject matter, the excitement of the sculptor’s innovations and his pleasure in working outdoors with fire and fragrant natural elements. “Pour” was a far from perfect score, but, in 1969, at 22, it was the best I could do.

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About the same time, while studying acoustics with Chowning, he showed me a new score he thought would interest me that had just come into our library. It was Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Atmospheres.” The score itself, intensely detailed in its orchestration and rhythm, amazed me. I realized that Ligeti, using conventional instruments, had addressed many issues we were wrestling with on the computer. When I discovered he was living in Vienna I tried to find a way to get to Austria to study with him. I was very lucky. In the spring of 1969 Ligeti accepted me as his student and I received a Fulbright Fellowship to Austria. In September I left my studies at Stanford for a year in Vienna.

I brought a number of scores and tapes of music, including “Pour”, with me. As soon as I arrived in I was confronted with a terrible set-back. Gyorgy Ligeti had just won the Berliner Künstlerpreis and soon left for Berlin. It was a bitter disappointment. I almost decided to go home, but the opportunity to live abroad was too good to pass up. I did manage to see Ligeti at several lectures and concerts when he returned to Vienna during the year, but it was not until he came to teach at Stanford in 1972 that I finally studied with him.

III.

Ronald Zak/Associated PressAustrian composer Gottfried von Einem.

In Ligeti’s absence I was assigned to study at the Akademie füer Musik with another teacher. After several unfruitful lessons with Erich Urbanner, the Fulbright people decided since I was an unorthodox wild man from California, I should study with the equally wild non-conformist Gottfried von Einem. It’s true von Einem was a non-conformist, but not in the way one might imagine. A confirmed anti-modernist, Gottfried von Einem was possibly the most conservative composer in Europe. He wrote tonal, melodious, rhythmically pulsate music without the slightest regard for the prevailing atonal, a-rhythmic fashion at the time.

Von Einem loved Duke Ellington and Leonard Bernstein, told me to listen to unique music of Leos Janacek and talked with me about his ongoing struggles with Friedrich Durrenmatt, the Swiss author and librettist of his new opera, “Der Besuch Der Alten Dame” (“The Visit”). Graciously, when he could not attend himself, he gave me tickets to his personal box at the venerable state theater — the Staatsoper — where, when I would turn up in my informal American clothes, the ushers would rush up to me speaking English, insisting I was headed for the wrong seat. When I explained to them in German that I was a student of Herr Professor Doktor von Einem, their demeanor would instantly and unpleasantly change from rude to fawning.

IV.

The person responsible for my participation in the Second International Free Composers Tribune in Prague in March 1970 was actually an American — the composer Eric Stokes. Soon after meeting on the steps of the Akademie, we became great friends, taking trips together to the countryside with our families and eventually sharing a concert at the Amerika Haus.

Courtesy of Martin BresnickEric Stokes in 1969

Eric was the first “Ivesian” composer I ever met. There were very few of them in those days and there are not many now. I always felt vaguely embarrassed by Charles Ives. I found his music too candid, too forthright. It stuck out like a crazy, opinionated uncle at a polite social event — too unsophisticated for a sophisticated new music audience. In Vienna, program notes referred to his music as “ganz lustig” — quite amusing — a sort of musical joke.

I am ashamed now to recall unspoken, unexamined feelings of condescension I felt toward Ives, and also towards Eric’s work at the time. His music was similar to Ives in its exploration and embrace of negligible sounds, and also similar to Ives’ music in its frank celebration of it’s American origins. Eric inserted quotations from Thoreau, Whitman and other American authors in his music as well as his own sometimes angry, sometimes plaintive texts about the destruction of nature and murder of animals by greed and ignorance. Eric’s “Ivesian” popular music quotations and arrangements were also a consistent feature of his music.

But I was also attracted by Eric’s informal, empirical, “try it and see” approach. His attempt to live a “life in music” included not only his music, but his whole life as he lived it: music, art, poetry, human relations, a love for the natural world and more. His was a generous, democratic, expansive project — I studied his living example.

Eric found the small announcement about the Second International Free Composers Tribune, tacked up somewhere. While we both sent in applications neither he nor I imagined we had any chance of being invited. It would be difficult, in those pre-1989 days, to get a visa and expensive to change the money at the absurd exchange rates required by Czechoslovakia. But beautiful Prague, only six hours from Vienna by train, beckoned. It was worth a try.

When both our invitations to participate arrived we immediately got visas, changed money and bought rail tickets. Eric and his wife Cynthia found musicians and other sympathetic people in Prague who arranged for us to stay overnight in their homes for one U.S. dollar a night.

V.

We arrived at Prague Central Station on the evening of March 3, 1970, in a blinding snow storm. Jan Brazdil, an older, but very vigorous one-armed survivor of the Czech resistance in World War II, was waiting for us. Despite the darkness, despite the ominous presence of armed Soviet and Warsaw pact troops and tanks stationed in Prague, and despite the falling snow, Pan (Mr.) Brazdil, insisted on walking us around the astonishing but nearly invisible old city.

Look, he said with great pride as we peered through the storm, there is the Jan Hus monument in the center of the great square, there’s the Powder Tower, the Wenceslaus Platz, the Smetana Museum, the statue of King Charles holding the charter at the entrance to Charles University (from a certain angle, as he pointed out with his special Prague humor, you see, he’s taking a leak), the old and new synagogues, the Jewish cemetery, the Laterna Magika theater, there is the Moldau, and finally, there was the incomparable Charles Bridge, empty of pedestrians, its statues draped in snow.

Eric stayed that night at the Brazdil’s, while I was placed in the care of Jan Krupka, head librarian of the music section of the library of the city of Prague, and his wife, the composer Elena Petrova. Jan and Elena were both very knowledgable multi-lingual musicians — both supporters of the suppressed Prague Spring.

The next morning was bright and clear. Jan and Elena showed me the city Library and more of the old city. Struggling with a resignation and despair, they talked about the many institutions and experimental projects the reinstalled hard-liners were implacably closing down since 1968 all over the country, most especially in Prague.

GERARD LEROUX/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn 1969, people of what was then Czechoslovakia paid tribute to Jan Palach, a student who had set himself on fire to protest Soviet occupation.

Standing near the Charles Bridge we saw a worker whitewashing over a name that had been painted on the pedestrian side of the bridge. It was the name of Jan Palach, the young student who had burned himself to death the year before protesting the Soviet invasion. Whenever I passed by I saw that someone had again painted Palach’s name on the bridge during the night and each day another worker was sent to whitewash over it.

In the evening we went to concerts at the Smetana Hall in the immense Municipal building. It is difficult to describe what music meant to the Czechs then. The audience listened to everything with the most focused attention imaginable and musicians played with a passion I had never experienced. In Prague, in 1970, all music seemed to be a testament of freedom, filled with unspoken messages of defiance and resistance. When a work ended, the audience broke into wild applause, wept, cheered, then eagerly spoke to each other in Czech, guessing the Soviet soldiers scattered in the crowd could not understand them.

VI.

On each of the three days of The Free International Composers Tribune five composers presented their music. The sessions at the Janacek Composers’ Club began at 10:15 a.m. and lasted until the afternoon. The hall was always packed with people. Clearly this event had been previously organized during the Prague Spring. Like other cultural enterprises of the Dubcek period it was designed to introduce the Czechoslovak public to what had been forbidden. Somehow, despite the troops and tanks in the streets it went on, for at least a little longer.

The Czech-American composer Karel Husa was represented on the first day by his String Quartet No. 3 (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969). Husa did not attend. It is very likely he had been specifically disinvited because of his composition “Music For Prague 1968,” written as a direct protest to the crushing of the Prague Spring. Still, his name was on the program. Someone must have later paid dearly for that!

On the second day Eric Stokes presented his tuba concerto “A Center Harbor Holiday.” I presented the film “Pour” on the third and final day of the Tribune. On that last day the composers were, in order, Helmut Lachenmann, Wilhelm Killmeyer, Peter Maxwell Davies, Hans Ulrich Engelmann, me, and Luigi Nono.

It was a remarkable list and, if I remember correctly, with the possible exception of Engelmann, all the composers were in attendance. I believe that both Lachenmann and Davies left immediately after speaking and playing their tapes.

Someone obviously had something in mind by putting me, a very young and completely unknown American, among these well established composers and especially placing me next-to-last, before the very famous Luigi Nono. Was Nono, with his Communist Party bona fides, placed last as a point of honor? Was he there to support or criticize the new political regime? Did he follow me to expose my peculiarly American musical and ideological shortcomings? Did Luigi Nono himself have a say about the program order? I will probably never know.

Jan and Elena sat beside me listening attentively to everything that was played and said. When I did not catch a word or phrase one of them would whisper in English to help me.

Video

Pour

Martin Bresnick created the score for this film about an inventive casting technique.

“Pour,” a 1969 film by Kathy Hansen and Betsy Blackmer about the sculptor Merrill Bickford, with a music by the author.

I don’t remember exactly what I said about “Pour” when my turn came. I recall that I spoke about the new computer music experiments at Stanford and referred to the Irish folk song I had interpolated in the score. I may have mentioned Yeats. Since “Pour” was the only movie represented at the tribune I also remember commenting about writing music for films. When I finished speaking for my allotted 10 minutes Mr. Okurka projected the movie.

“Pour” was generously well-received by the audience. Gratified and relieved I settled back in my seat next to Jan and Elena to hear what Luigi Nono would say.

Nono began speaking in a crisp, flawless German. He said that before he could describe his own composition, he was obliged to criticize what he had just seen and heard. At this there was an audible stir in the room. The Czech audience was embarrassed — Elena whispered to me — this was unacceptable behavior.

Unperturbed, Nono continued. He said that my score contained many obvious faults: a failure of the music to critique the representational mode of the film; the improper use of tonal or modal materials in an atonal setting, which would lead irrevocably to a regression in critical music thinking and make the music aesthetically and historically irrelevant; and finally, after a long list of other errors, my reliance on a song of the rural peasantry rather than the industrial proletariat could not possibly be progressive because, as Marx had so clearly pointed out, the peasantry could not be revolutionary: they do not form a class; they are shapeless, just as “potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.” It was a good thing for me that Nono seemed unaware of Yeats’ fascist period!

I was stunned and bewildered — but also intrigued. As the child of immigrant leftists growing up in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Housing Projects in the Bronx and as a participant in numerous SDS meetings at Stanford, I had heard strong ideological confrontations before. But I couldn’t understand why the famous Luigi Nono would use this moment in occupied Prague to sharpen his ideological claws on such a harmless scratching post. A few years later I learned more about Nono’s own search for a unified music and politics, but at the time I simply couldn’t understand — why here, why now, why me?

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Several dozen people left the hall as Nono finished his critique of my music and began to speak about his own. Since he had already exhausted his allotted time even more people got up noisily and left. Taking no notice, for the next 10 minutes Nono described how his tape had been recorded on the streets of Paris during the uprising of May 1968. Since industrial workers had taken some part in these demonstrations, his inclusion of their chants and other noises of protest was both politically and musically objectively progressive. The title “Non Consumiamo Marx” (We Cannot Consume Marx) was further evidence of the revolutionary intention and character of his composition.

As Mr Okurka threaded the tape recorder Jan and Elena begged me to leave with them and others in the audience. The Czechs had heard these arguments many times since 1948 and could not bear to hear them again — especially not in German. But I was interested in the points Nono was making. I had considered some of them myself (though not about this film score) and I wanted very much to hear how “Non Consumiamo Marx” would achieve a correct political and musical position.

Nono’s piece began with what seemed to me then a roar of mostly undifferentiated noise and continued in that way without much change for a long time. As members of the audience left, the hall became even more reverberant. The sound was deafening. Apparently it was not loud enough for Nono, who, sitting next to Okurka, pushed the technician away from the amplifier so he could control the volume himself. Nono continuously turned the decibel level higher, nearing the threshold of pain. Through the surging masses of sound I could just barely make out the Italian partisan song “O Bella Ciao,” people chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Min”, and later “Mao, Mao, Mao Tse-Tung.”

When it was over Nono silently rewound his tape and put it back in the box. Only the three of us remained in the hall: Nono, Okurka and me.

Nono said nothing as he left. In any case I probably could not have been able to hear a word.

VII.

The following evening Jan and Elena managed to get us all tickets for a performance of Mozart and Da Ponte’s “Don Giovanni,” performed in Italian by a local ensemble at the beautiful Stavovské divadlo (Estates Theater), where the great opera received its first performance in 1787.

Like every other musical event we heard in Prague, this one was packed with people. The very old small theater could not contain another soul. However from our seats in the top balcony we could still easily see and hear everything below. A group Russian officers, formally dressed in their large caps and drab green uniforms with bright red epaulettes, sat rather conspicuously in the front row.

The spirited, if not perfect, performance proceeded without incident until shortly before the end of act one. At the beginning of the 20th scene Don Giovanni invites the three masked guests (Donna Anna, Don Ottavio and Donna Elvira) to a party at his home.

When the masked guests arrive Don Giovanni himself welcomes them, singing: ““È aperto a tutti quanti! Viva la libertà!” — It is open to all, long live liberty!

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As soon as they all finished the audience burst into wild applause. They stamped on the floor and shouted, “Viva la libertà!” The conductor tried vainly to start the next section but the noise in the hall was too great for anyone to hear the orchestra. He raised his arms several more times, turning to the audience, helplessly gesturing for silence while the singers stood confused on stage. In the continuing uproar the Russian officers looked around anxiously. The applause went on and on and on.

A long hour later Don Giovanni could finally be heard singing his next line to the musicians: “Ricominciate il suono” — Begin again to play.

And they did.

Martin Bresnick is Charles T. Wilson Professor in the Practice of Composition at Yale University. His music has been performed and recorded worldwide. He is the recipient of the first Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Rome Prize, The Berlin Prize and others. More of his work can be found and heard at his Web site.

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The Score features the writings of composers on their work and the issues involved in creating music in the 21st century, as the traditional notion of “classical” continues to be reconsidered, revised and reimagined. The guest curator of the series is Daniel Felsenfeld.